This essay is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
“She wasn’t a whore at all,” a disembodied female narrator insists over footage of someone pulling on over-the-elbow leather gloves. “She liked fun, she liked excitement. Is there anything wrong with that?” These are the opening seconds of Roxanna—a 70s porno about a young blonde whose out-of-control libido plunges her into despair, insanity, and loneliness over 51 minutes of trashy, mostly-lesbian softcore with an acid-washed soundtrack. A freeze frame of her face, thrown back in ecstasy, would end up becoming the cover of Deftones’ Saturday Night Wrist.
Described by Chino Moreno as an album of “straight evil music,” Saturday Night Wrist was written when tensions between the band were at an all-time high, and the excesses of sex, drugs, and booze that fueled previous albums were wreaking havoc on their personal lives. It’s a bleak body of work that fires indiscriminately at everything around it. While it may begin with a pint-launching guitar riff and a “Woo!”, the first words Moreno utters on opener “Hole in the Earth” are a curdled, desperate plea: “Can you explain to me how / You’re so evil, how?”
The album mulls this question as Moreno plunges himself into despair, insanity, and loneliness over 56 minutes of mostly miserable songs with a sinister erotic charge. Sex is conflated with sickness on “Pink Cellphone,” an injured woman wearily “haunts the roads” on “Riviere,” and “Drive”, a cover of The Cars, also works in a sample of Massive Attack’s “Protection”—a story about the impulse to shelter a wayward girl from harm, until the line between concern and possession begins to blur (“Who’s gonna drive you home… tonight?”). On “Beware,” Moreno moans over jackhammer guitars while repeatedly asking if “you like the way the water tastes.”
These tracks were almost certainly influenced by the ongoing dissolution of Moreno’s marriage, but crucially the emotions that come through in the abstract—obsession, danger, abjection—are the same ones that sit at the darker end of sexual experience. The uneasy thrust of songs like “Beware” almost veers into the gothic horror terrain of Ethel Cain, which perhaps helps explain Deftones’ venerated status among e-girls. Basically, loads of it is about women in a way that completely transcends gender because the songs are often written from the female point of view, and the lyrics are so cryptic you can never be certain what they mean anyway. The artwork was pulled together by designer Frank Maddocks, but its contents do coincidentally mirror-flip Roxanna, with psychodrama at the front and sex as subtext. Like, what if a B movie adult actress was also the frontman and primary lyricist of an alt-metal band?
Deftones’ reputation as a “sex band” has been around almost as long as they have. Granted, they’re not as on the nose with it as some of their “horny metal” peers—like Nine Inch Nails, whose breakout single had Trent Reznor threatening to “fuck you like an animal,” or Type-O Negative, whose 6’8 viking of a frontman, Peter Steele, appeared in Playgirl clutching a bouquet of pink flowers in one hand and his rock hard boner in the other—and the singles that first made Deftones massive, “My Own Summer (Shove It)” and “Back To School (Mini Maggit),” lumped them in with late 90s/early 2000s wallet-chain rebellion more than anything else. But you don’t have to dip your toe far below the surface to feel the erotic undercurrent.
“What if a B movie adult actress was also the frontman and primary lyricist of an alt-metal band?”
A lot of it is in the storytelling: a woman kidnapping a guy on “Feiticeira”; half-remembered fragments of “floating underwear” and “hours of pleasure” on “Sextape”; the Ed Kemper-style fantasy of electrocuting a girl to death and then re-dressing her on “Digital Bath.” But, even without all that, there’s something about the atmosphere of their music that has made it the primo ‘fingering at a house party’ soundtrack for four decades, and prompted sexual awakenings across three generations and counting.
For millennial goths, that awakening was likely delivered by Queen of the Damned, the 2002 vampire film in which Aaliyah has violent sex in a bathtub filled with rose petals to “Change (In the House of Flies).” For Gen Z, it straddles two separate trends—shoegaze and male-moaning ASMR—that have permeated social media since 2020. (In 2023, someone posted a long X thread where they went through every Deftones album in order, leaving annotated timestamps of when Moreno does his finest whimpering.) Gen X skaters and metalheads would, of course, have been dry humping to “Mascara” at Ozzfest long before that.
Yet while Deftones often reference sex and drugs, they’re hardly “a sex, drugs, and rock and roll” band. With the notable exception of “MX,” which Moreno opens by groaning about “your pussy and your bones,” their handling of sex is more subtle and cerebral than Mötley Crüe banging on about “Girls, Girls, Girls” or Lil Jon compelling the club to “Bend over to the front / Touch the toes!” Deftones have the effect of making you feel a certain way without really knowing why. The lyrics are all suggestion, and the rest is pure vibe. The phrase “around the fur,” for instance, is supposedly about the dark underbelly of the beauty industry. But it also makes you think, invariably, about pubic hair. The cover of the album does much the same.
“There’s something about the atmosphere of their music that has… prompted sexual awakenings across three generations and counting”
That’s what Deftones are best at. They place an image in your head, and leave you to do the rest. That cocktail of indirect references and gentle provocation accounts for their erotic pull across basically every demographic, from hot girl TikTok influencers to Iraq war veterans. One of the earliest architects of Deftones’ ascent was Madonna. She was passed their two-track demo by a friend of a friend of the band when she co-ran her newly minted entertainment company Maverick, which had already established itself as a purveyor of “risky business.” (Their first two releases were Sex, Madonna’s 1992 coffee table book of explicit self-portraits, and its accompanying studio album Erotica—both works of sexual taboo equally lauded and slammed by critics for their “audacity.”) She prompted the call that got Deftones signed for their first five albums, then gifted them an autographed, semi-naked poster of herself.
Obviously, you could also throw all this out of the window and simply say their music “fucks,” which it does. It boils with rage but blisters with tenderness at the same time, owing to the fact that they write monolithic metal guided by the yearning hands of trip-hop, shoegaze, and Sade. The result is a sound that feels like two people fucking in a burning building at the end of the world. There’s suffering there if you want it, pure animalism there if you want it, and male sensitivity there if you want it. A real gooner’s buffet. Moreno’s lyrics, though rarely fun, are predominantly made up of fantasies and fleeting impulses. They find a kind of excitement, evil or otherwise, everywhere from the strip club to the passenger seat. And as the faceless narrator wondered of Roxanna, “Is there anything wrong with that?”
Emma Garland is the author of Gabrielle, a newsletter about sex culture and desire. Follow her on Instagram: @emmaggarland
This essay is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
The post Deftones: Anatomy of a Sex Band appeared first on VICE.
